Lydia Holmes and John Clarke started small when they launched their restaurant business – really small.
In 2021, the Orange County, California-based couple opened their first restaurant, LJ’s Lil’ Cafe, in a 200-square-foot shed in a Home Depot parking lot. They also opened a brick-and-mortar location in July 2025. The two restaurants together brought in $2.3 million in sales in 2025, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Holmes, 36, and Clarke, 33, met in 2012 while working at a Seasons 52 restaurant in Costa Mesa, California. Though neither had formal culinary training, a shared love for food brought them together, according to Holmes. “One thing that we bonded on was how much we enjoyed trying new places and findingthese hole-in-the-wall places or super extravagant places that just had really good food,” she tells CNBC Make It.
Whenever they had a particularly good meal at a restaurant, Holmes and Clarke would attempt to recreate the dish at home with their “own little twist.” Their culinary experiments sparked an idea, Holmes says: “Maybe we could do this one day as a business.”
When the couple learned that the shed, which already had a fully equipped kitchen, was available, they leapt at the opportunity to open their own restaurant.
Going in ‘with no experience’
Establishing a restaurant in a parking lot may seem like an atypical choice, but Clarke says that the shed’s location at a Home Depot in Cypress, California was “one of the biggest sells” because it provided a “built-in customer base” of shoppers and store employees.
Clarke and Holmes purchased the shed in 2021 for $95,000 from its previous owner, who had also run a cafe out of it. A family member loaned them money to buy it, and Clarke and Holmes say they are paying the loan back in monthly installments. The couple also pays $1,325 per month to lease the land the shed sits on from Home Depot.
Holmes and Clarke were drawn to the Home Depot location because it provided a “built-in customer base.”
On Sept. 4, 2021, they officially launched LJ’s Lil’ Cafe, with Holmes’ two younger brothers as their first employees. At the time, Clarke and Holmes were living with Holmes’ parents to save money on rent.
Business was slow at first, according to Clarke. He estimates that LJ’s Lil’ Cafe was bringing in between $200 to $300 in daily sales on weekdays, maybe a little bit more on the weekends. He guesses that about $150 of those sales came from Home Depot employees on their lunch break.
Attracting a larger customer base was a challenge, Holmes says. “We went into this with no experience. We didn’t know about marketing. We didn’t even have any social media accounts, or an email account,” she says. The early stages of the restaurant involved “a lot of trial and error and learning.”
“What kept us going back then [was] the great feedback we’d get,” Clarke says.
Betting on burritos
At first, LJ’s Lil’ Cafe’s menu was centered around burgers, sandwiches and hot dogs, but the couple soon figured out that customers were coming for their breakfast burritos.
Their top-selling item, the OG breakfast burrito, contains 25 “extra crispy” tater tots so that “every bite has a nice big crunch,” Clarke says. They also add a “ridiculous amount of cheese” — approximately one cup of a Monterey Jack and cheddar blend — to each one.
The OG breakfast burrito has gone viral for its cheesiness.
At first, they charged around $8.75 per burrito, but they say the price has since gone up to $15.99, partially due to rising egg and meat costs. LJ’s Lil’ Cafe now offers spicy and vegetarian versions, too.
Focusing on burritos proved to be the key to their success. In 2022, a freelance writer tried their OG breakfast burrito and asked Clarke if he could write about their business. A few weeks later, they saw that he had published a rave review about LJ’s Lil’ Cafe for Eater, a national publication that covers food and dining.
“That completely changed the trajectory of our business overnight,” Holmes says. The very next day, Clarke says, customers lined up outside in the Home Depot parking lot waiting for the restaurant to open. “I thinkimmediatelywe hit our first thousand-dollar sales day,” he recalls.
Business boomed after that, according to Clarke, but wait times for customers skyrocketed. At one point, customers had to wait two to three hours for a burrito, he says.
Expanding the business
After hiring a general manager to oversee the restaurant’s day-to-day operations in October 2023, Holmes and Clarke decided to open another location.
In April 2025, the couple purchased a storefront restaurant in Orange, California for $148,000, which they funded with a loan Holmes’ grandparents helped them secure.
In 2025, the original location of LJ’s Lil’ Cafe brought in just over $1 million in gross sales, and the Orange location brought in almost $1.3 million after opening in July. With 29 employees across both locations, Holmes says, labor is one of the their biggest expenses, along with food and packaging costs.
Clarke and Holmes opened a storefront location of LJ’s Lil’ Cafe in July 2025. It was a “huge risk and test” for their business, Holmes says.
Neither Holmes nor Clarke had any “knowledge of how to run a business” before launching their own, Holmes says: “If we could do it, anyone can do it.”
They’ve since developed their own areas of expertise within the business: Holmes is in charge of payroll, HR and social media, while Clarke handles vendors, bills and equipment. Their next step is to open another storefront location of LJ’s Lil’ Cafe in Cypress to bring down wait times at the Home Depot shed.
For Holmes, the magnitude of what they’d accomplished didn’t register immediately. “I remember I was driving to work about six months after we opened our Orange location, and Idon’tknow what happened, but it just hit me,” she recalls.”I waslike,’This is it.We’regood.We’vemade it.'”
Holmes says she expects they’ll “never be able to step away” from being closely involved in the business, but for her, that’s part of the fun: “It keeps us on ourtoes.”
There are a lot of pros and “some cons” to working together in addition to living and raising two sons together, Holmes says. “We’retalking about work till we go to bed at 11 o’clock at night,” she says. “But it’s also really nice to be able toshare this success with the person that you love the most in the world.”
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